A member of the Air Force home on leave has a police officer from the Vineyard to thank for being alive to enjoy this holiday season. On Sunday morning at 3 a.m. Island native and former Oak Bluffs police officer Ryan Lehman pulled Cameron Kaufman from his burning car in Raymond, N.H., with only seconds to spare before the vehicle was swallowed up by the blaze.

Mr. Kaufman is 20 and a resident of Bedford, N.H.

“I’m just glad that I was at the right place at the right time,” Mr. Lehman, an officer with the Raymond police department, told the Gazette on Wednesday. On duty at the time, Mr. Lehman was responding to a suspicious vehicle report at a 7-11 store when the call came in from his dispatch of a crash off a nearby off-ramp on Route 101 East in the New Hampshire town.

“By chance it happened to be only 300 yards from my position at the time,” he said. The car apparently had veered off the ramp and careened into a wooded triangle that separates the off and on-ramps.

Ordinarily when such a call comes in it is protocol for an officer to get on the adjacent on-ramp, merge with traffic, take a crossover (which Mr. Lehman jokingly describes as the strip of pavement in the median that drivers are tempted to take if they miss an exit), then take another crossover before returning to the off-ramp in question so he or she could set up behind the accident and protect it from traffic. But when Mr. Lehman saw the blaze he realized that there wasn’t enough time. So he pulled over to the shoulder of the on-ramp, and ran into the woods of the median triangle.

“I just ran toward the glow of the fire,” he said. The car lay nearly 50 feet from the road and almost 30 feet into the woods. “When I approached the vehicle I saw that almost a half of it was engulfed in flames.”

When Mr. Lehman came upon the car he saw an unconscious young man through what was left of the smashed driver’s side window. The man still had his seat belt on.

“I yelled at him a couple times real quickly and he was unresponsive so I reached in and unfastened his seat belt and noticed that the gas and the brake pedals were starting to melt, and the flames were starting to creep up toward the steering wheel,” he said. “I grabbed him by the jacket, but there was a tree in the way so there really wasn’t much space, but I managed to pull him out.

“It was a close call. I took two or three steps away from the vehicle and the entire vehicle flashed over.”

As Mr. Lehman dragged the driver away from the fire the man began to regain consciousness but was still unable to stand on his own. Mr. Lehman’s biggest concern was whether there were additional passengers, either in the car or ejected into the woods from the violent crash.

Armed with a Maglite Mr. Lehman approached the blaze again and luckily found no passengers.

“There was probably no chance of anyone else surviving if I had to get another person out of there,” he said.

When the fire department and EMTs arrived, an infrared survey of the area turned up no additional passengers in the woods. Surveying the scene, the spectacular nature of the crash became apparent.

“You could see the tops of the shrubs where the branches got scruffed up by the undercarriage of the vehicle,” Mr. Lehman said. “It was about four feet in the air.”

During the scramble to save the young man, Mr. Lehman said his actions were instinctual.

“I almost regret to tell you that there weren’t a whole lot of thoughts going through my head at the time,” he said. “I knew that I had to get him out of there and my biggest fear was obviously whether he was alive or not. In addition, I was really worried about whether there were additional occupants in the vehicle, because by the time I got him out it was completely engulfed.”

Mr. Lehman has no doubts that the driver’s seat belt played a significant role in his survival.

“Almost definitely,” he said. “The reason why the vehicle stopped is because it struck the tree. Of the crashes that I’ve seen there was definitely a potential that he would have been ejected.”

The cause of the accident is still under investigation, though police believe alcohol may have been a factor.

In the days since the rescue Mr. Leh-man, who is the son of Brenda and Chuck Lehman of Oak Bluffs and a 1997 graduate of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, said he has heard from friends and family on the Island congratulating him on his heroics.

“It’s spread a lot farther than I thought or anticipated,” he said. “It’s kind of flattering. I’ve gotten calls from home, and Channel 7 even came up from Boston to interview me, which was really flattering.”

Although Mr. Lehman has been off-duty for the past few days, the young man’s father has repeatedly dropped by the Raymond police station to thank the police officer for saving his son’s life.

Reflecting on the accident and subsequent rescue, so much of which relied on Mr. Lehman’s fortuitous proximity to the accident, he credits the driver’s survival less to his own efforts than to fate.

“It wasn’t his time, I guess.”